


Watching The Rain

by Jade_II



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: but doesn't have to be, could be pre-Janeway/Paris
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24405310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_II/pseuds/Jade_II
Summary: Janeway and Paris are marooned together on an alien planet, waiting for Voyager. Kathryn starts to worry that she won't turn up.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25
Collections: Kathryn Janeway Needs A Hug





	Watching The Rain

_Captain’s log, stardate 52736.4. Three weeks have passed since the date we had calculated Voyager would be most likely to enter this star system. We’ve still received no communication from her, no answers to our hails…_

Kathryn sighed, staring at the shuttle’s console. What was even the point of this? If Voyager didn’t turn up these logs weren’t likely to be any use to anybody, or even to be listened to again by anyone but herself. Why did she persist in making them? They’d been the same for the last three weeks anyway – longer, if she was being honest with herself. They’d been waiting for Voyager for far longer than that.

Idly, she tapped at the console to bring up her first log, the one she’d recorded when they’d first arrived here, and tried to remind herself of the cautious optimism she had tried to cultivate.

_…pulled through an unstable wormhole and ended up 1500 light-years closer to the Alpha Quadrant. We were able to get a signal through to Voyager, they know where we are; they’ll just have to get here the long way round._

_In the meantime, at least Lieutenant Paris and I have each other for company._

Tom’s voice interrupted another sigh. “Talking about me to yourself again, Captain?”

Kathryn chuckled wryly. “Something like that. Who else am I going to talk to about you, right?”

“You can talk to me.” He hit the control to close the shuttle’s hatch and used his sleeve to wipe the rain off his face.

“Not if I don’t want to over-inflate your ego, I can’t.”

“Oh, so you were saying good things?” Cheerfully he moved forward and took a seat next to her, dumping his bag on the floor between them.

“Depends what you’ve brought me for dinner.”

Tom grinned, but that was no reliable indicator of dinner quality – his amusement from watching her grimaces when the food was bad seemed to make him nearly as happy as actually enjoying the food when it was good. The aromas wafting up from the bag were promising, but even they could be deceiving.

The grin widened, and he pulled out two smaller bags. When Kathryn saw them she grinned too – this was a good food day, she recognized the vendor’s packaging and she knew that the pastries inside were delicious, filled with spiced vegetables and a kind of local cheese.

“You had a profitable day,” she surmised.

“I sold the story of the three billy goats gruff to three different bards,” Tom confirmed smugly.

The one godsend they’d had since landing here, well over eighteen months ago now, was that stories were so valued in the local culture that they could be bought and sold, and between the two of them and the shuttle’s database so far they hadn’t run out of material that no one here had heard before.

It would have been nice if these stories were valued perhaps a little more highly still, maybe even enough for them to not have had to live in a shuttle for a year and a half, but considering the alternatives Kathryn considered them to be very lucky.

That was what she told herself, anyway.

It was becoming more difficult.

She noticed how Tom very deliberately didn’t ask if she had any news; he knew that she would have told him straight away if she did. But the omission left a gap in their normal low-key dinner conversation.

Before she had even considered it properly she found herself filling it. “Still nothing from Voyager.”

He nodded, looking at his pastries rather than at her. “Yeah. I guessed.” A pause. “But they’ll come.”

“We don’t know that, Tom.” She leaned back in her chair, looking out at the expanse of tarmac which housed their shuttle along with the small craft of a host of other semi-permanent residents. It was still raining out there. It was always raining. “At what point do we assume they’re not coming?”

“Not yet.” He spoke with his mouth full, as though perhaps she’d be less likely to argue with half-swallowed words. “They’re only a couple of weeks late. There’s any number of things that could cause that kind of delay.”

“I think it’s time we started to think more seriously about contingencies.”

“I am not doing the cryo-freezing thing,” he said immediately, shaking his head.

She didn’t turn her head as she replied. “It could be the only way we stand a chance of reaching the Alpha Quadrant without a vessel with Voyager’s warp capabilities. It’s a popular mode of transport in this sector, we should be able to find a reputable company.”

“Captain… to be honest, I don’t know that I care that much.”

That made her look at him. “What do you mean?”

He swallowed another bite of pastry. “Look. On Voyager, it was different. Everybody else wanted to get home, I was tagging along, it was fine. But everybody I care about is on that ship. I don’t have people or even places in the Alpha Quadrant that I’m desperate to get back to. And to do something like willingly allowing myself to be frozen in a coffin for decades or longer, I’d have to be pretty damned desperate.” He gestured out at the rainy landscape. “There are opportunities here. We both have marketable skills. We could make a living – a real living, if we weren’t bound to this particular place anymore. That sounds a lot more exciting to me than waking up back in a place where I never felt that welcome to begin with.”

Kathryn picked up one of her own pastries and nibbled it, not completely certain how to reply.

Tom looked her in the eye and continued instead. “Part of me wonders if getting home has become so core to your expectations of yourself over the last couple of years that you can’t see that there might be better things out there.”

That shook her. That was something she hadn’t even considered – no, she had to admit; it was something she hadn’t wanted to let herself consider. Because it made everything that much more complicated. Getting home was a simple directive, even if it wasn’t simple to carry it out. Anything else was fraught with the danger of getting it wrong.

But who was there to get it wrong _for_ anymore? If Voyager was gone, and there was only Tom…

“You could be right,” she admitted quietly.

He looked at her, his expression serious, and nodded.

“But if they’re dead out there,” she continued, before she could get a grip on herself and avoid pouring her heart out, “then that’s my fault. That’s what makes this waiting so difficult. And maybe that’s why I want to think about moving on from here. Maybe part of me wants to pretend I’ve finished mourning already.”

“There’s nothing and no one to mourn right now,” Tom stated.

“They could have all died a year ago or more and we’d never know it,” Kathryn said, voicing her worst fear.

“Kathryn,” he said, and hearing him use her given name had her turning to face him before she even knew she was doing it. “They’re three weeks late. How many times did we come across things that could delay us by that much? Going around alien territories, opportunities for shore leave, unique phenomena to investigate… Any of those, any _combination_ of those could make a three-week difference. What would Chakotay say if he knew you were talking like this? Or Tuvok? They’re probably telling the rest of the crew right now not to worry, they’ll find the captain – and the dashing pilot – safe and sound. Right where we agreed to meet.” He spread his arms. “And here we are. What reason do we have to think they would do worse than us? Don’t tell me you don’t think they’re capable enough to handle whatever the Delta Quadrant has thrown at them these last eighteen months.”

She didn’t know why it was that that did it, and she turned her head to try to hide it, but she knew he had seen the tears spilling over her cheeks even as she nodded, desperately trying to pretend she wasn’t coming completely unravelled in front of him.

Tom, bless him, just passed her a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was incredibly unprofessional of me.” Past tense, as though her eyes weren’t still streaming. As though the moment had already passed, a mere split-second of lost focus. As though she were completely fine again. As though he would believe that for an instant.

“Tell you what,” he said, standing and making his way aft. “I earned enough today that we can afford something from the replicator. Let me treat you to some dessert.”

“That’s not necessary.” She cleared her throat, trying to pull herself together. “Thank you for the offer.”

“Two bowls of coffee ice cream,” he said, and he winked at her as she heard the whine of the replicator. “Too late.”

“Tom…”

“Come on. Live a little.” He hit the control to lower the shuttle’s ramp, and she watched his silhouette against the widening opening as the sound of the rain grew louder. Tom put the bowls of ice cream down at the top of the ramp, and then he came back towards her and picked up his half-empty bag of pastries. He held out his hand. “Madame?”

Kathryn snorted, but allowed him to help her up. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

He led her to the top of the ramp, and they sat side by side, watching the never-ending torrents fall from the sky.

Kathryn tried to cheer up, but the weather wasn’t conducive. She finished her pastries quickly, before they had time to go cold, and so the ice cream couldn’t melt before she began to eat it.

The tears threatened to come again when she picked up the bowl and smelled the coffee, and she shook her head, frustrated with herself.

“You don’t have to pretend to be okay if you’re not,” Tom said quietly.

She looked down at the ice cream rather than looking at his face. “I’m your captain.”

His arm was around her shoulder before she quite realized what was happening. “I’m your friend,” he said. “And there’s no one else here. Nobody can be strong all the time.”

She could have shrugged him off. She could have told him kindly but firmly that he was overstepping boundaries and behaving inappropriately. She didn’t.

With a sigh, she turned and leaned into him, burying her face in his neck, and she felt his other arm come up to hug her close. It was the first time she’d hugged anybody in over a year, and yes, here came the tears again. She stopped trying to stop them, and she felt better. She anchored herself instead against the calm, solid presence of Tom Paris, and let them come.

It seemed like a small eternity that she spent there in his arms, but when she finally pulled away her ice cream was only just beginning to melt. She smiled. “Thank you for this.”

“Any excuse for ice cream.” One arm still over her shoulder, he picked up his own bowl with the other and, balancing it on his leg, ate a first spoonful. “There’s nothing quite like it.”

“No place like home,” she murmured, pushing just the tiniest portion onto her spoon, determined to make it last.

“We’ll get there,” he stated. “They’ll come. I mean, Harry still owes me ten replicator rations. That’s ten more bowls of ice cream. There’s no way I’m missing out on that.”

Kathryn chuckled. After a split second’s hesitation, she allowed herself to rest her head on his shoulder. “Ice cream is a powerful motivator.”

He tightened his grip, and they sat there together eating ice cream and watching the rain, listening to it patter loudly onto the roof of the shuttle, and for a while she almost, _almost_ managed to stop listening out for the chirp of an incoming message.

Which was just as well, because it only came two weeks later.


End file.
